Customer Profile: Rooftop Love Club

The band Rooftop Love Club is blowing up in Toronto with a uniquely swampy, fuzzy blur between blues and grungy rock. With hundreds of thousands of fans, the two band members Jacob Weiss and Jake Hock are busy writing songs and playing shows across North America.

We got a chance to work with Rooftop Love Club to create these killer Chocolate Milk tee shirts. Recently we interviewed the band about success, failure and life in Toronto.

We ordered custom chocolate milk shirts (designed by the wickedly talented Ryan Abrams) to honour our reverence for such a wonderful beverage. Hopefully wearers of this fine shirt will feel they too are expressing their love for this delicious, chocolaty nectar.

Tell us about your band. How did you start? What’s your path been?

Rooftop Love Club are a garage rock duo from the boring suburbs above Toronto. Jake (guitar) and Jacob (drums) met in high school in 2013. Although we came from vastly different social groups, we immediately made a connection through music. We both have been playing our respective instruments from young ages.

We had been jamming with our close friend, Adam, mostly for fun, but we wanted something more than just playing Sabbath covers with their buddies. In 2014, I asked Jake to come over and jam, just the two us and see what happens. What happened was the formation of Rooftop Love Club and even though Jake referred to my guitar equipment as “pretty horse s***” we continued to play together as a two piece nonetheless.

From there we decided that we would rather make an income however which way until we could make a living as a touring band, ditching university in the process. We spent the next couple years studying every aspect of the industry, learning to do everything ourselves, and we’re currently booking an extensive tour from Toronto to Vancouver to San Diego and back without a booking agent… not to say we don’t want one though.

Our sound evolved as well, warping from raw blues into hard rock into self described “crack rock”. Being 21-year-olds in a complicated industry, there is still much more to learn and to improve on as we are never satisfied with our status. Onwards and upwards, that’s our mindset.

Your band has found a huge audience on Spotify and your website is killer. How do you promote your music online?

It’s a tough thing to do now a days with so much other stuff out there. A lot of bands write music and craft their look based on how successful it will make them in today’s industry. We’d prefer to sell out in every way except for the music and our live show, that has to stay. For example, we put out a video last month directed by our good friend, Henri Meleqi. We obviously want it to get views and this was around the time of the Superbowl so we just put a misleading title, “dominos superbowl ad leaked 2018” and put a thumbnail of a popular adult film star holding a pizza. It got us more views than we thought, but we could still use more because we’re desperate. So I’m just gonna leave it here: https://youtu.be/thvydeTWCrk and that’s one of our attempts at promoting our music.

You’re also running a massive tour, must be exhausting. How do you promote your shows?

We have a live session video in the works that will hopefully make people excited enough to come see us. The lineup itself is also fairly crucial to get people to come out. You wanna play with bands that you like, but will also draw. Nobody knows who we are in many cities so you essentially have to rely on other bands’ fan bases to bring people out and pray they like you too. It is quite exhausting.

You ordered those sweet Chocolate Milk shirts, do you find merch sales help with the costs of touring?

3. For right now, we can’t say because we’ve only played a handful of out-of-town shows. I don’t think we really expect it to considering people don’t know us too well. To spend $25 on a shirt of a bandyou just saw is probably rare. However, we specifically designed the tees with Ryan Abrams (https://www.instagram.com/ryanabrams/) to be something we would casually wear ourselves. Not just a shirt with our name on it, but a design that someone would look at and say, “I would wear that, sure.” People should wear this shirt, it’s pretty sleek and comfortable of course. Wear our shirt, but buy it first.

What advice would you give to a young person entering the music business?

-Start working as soon as you have any ideas and even before you have any ideas, then don’t stop.

-Quitting is for quitters.

-Keep looking for new and creative ways to accomplish tasks you thought couldn’t be completed because you’re too unknown or think you’re not good enough to go anywhere.

-If there isn’t someone there to do it for you, do I have to say it? Do it yourself.

-Failure is meaningless if there is always a “next time”. Oh, you had an awful show in Denver? You’ll play there again, it’s fine.

-Ask, always ask, you could end up playing Wembley Stadium if you’re just not afraid to simply ask to do so. Luck isn’t necessarily for losers, being opportunistic is where it’s at.

-Enjoy yourself, if you’re not doing at least that then we give you permission to be quitter.

-If a lot of people love each other, the world would be a better place to live.